
Engineering Ethics Blog
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The Engineering Ethics blog is a place for comments on current events with an engineering ethics angle. This blog discusses a much broader view of engineering ethics, and deal with subjects as diverse as disasters that involve technical matters, movies with an engineering ethics or technical angle, and even philosophical and religious questions that engineers might have to deal with.
Engineering Ethics Blog
6d ago
That headline is supposed to make you wonder what ADS-B is, as I did the first time I read about it. The mid-air collision, of course, is the tragedy that happened last January 29 when American Airlines flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was coming in for its final approach to runway 33 of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. About half a mile from the end of the runway, the plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter. Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac, killing all 64 on board the airliner and the three crew members on the helicopter. It was the worst U ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
1w ago
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott made the news the other day without ever touching a football. He came out in favor of federal legislation that would require Medicare to pay for a blood test that can detect 20 different types of cancer. Prescott's mother died of cancer, as did the mother of Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who is sponsoring the legislation.
A recent article in the Austin American-Statesman describes how two million people a year are diagnosed with cancer, but often too late to do anything about it. Prescott believes in the test so ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
2w ago
In Arthur Miller's famous play "Death of a Salesman," the salesman Willy Loman's wife Linda cries out at the climax, "Attention, attention must be paid to such a person." If we love someone, we honor them with attention, which is something only a conscious being can pay. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at current concerns that our attention spans are growing shorter because of social media and smartphones.
Some academics see the crisis as real. Immerwahr quotes theologian Adam Kotsko, who teaches at a small liberal-arts c ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
3w ago
Edwin Black certainly thinks it did. In 2001, he published the fruit of years of research he and dozens of volunteers conducted into the history of the International Business Machines Corporation and how its German offspring, called Dehomag, participated in Nazi Germany's highly organized wartime actions, including the execution of six million Jews and other "undesirables." The resulting 520-page book, IBM and the Holocaust, has to be one of the most excruciatingly detailed and exhaustively researched books on any technical aspect of World War II. But if you frame the ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
1M ago
. . all that smart, that is.
Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:
"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise! You're not in the car. ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own. It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."
What's not to like? Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is. A ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
1M ago
On Sunday Dec. 29, the Boeing 737-800 carrying 181 people on Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok to the South Korean regional airport in Muan crashed, killing all but two flight attendants on board. The circumstances of the crash are yet another example of how problems that may not be fatal individually can combine to create a major tragedy.
Following an apparently normal flight from Thailand, on the approach to Muan the pilot was warned of the presence of birds near the runway. According to the Wikipedia article on the accident, during their approach the pilots issued a mayda ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
1M ago
Early Christmas morning, an Embraer regional jet took off from Baku, Azerbaijan, which is on a peninsula extending from the middle of the western coast of the Caspian Sea. It is also the capital of Azerbaijan, a small country squeezed between Iran to the south and Russia to the north. Flight 8243 was headed to the provincial Russian capital of Grozny, and the normal route from Baku to Grozny lay along the eastern shoreline of the Caspian Sea.
But things were not normal in Grozny. In addition to heavy fog, Grozny was undergoing intermittent drone attacks as ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
1M ago
On a trip to the west Texas city of Midland last week, my wife and I took in the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum. Full disclosure requires that I let you know the following family history. My mother's father was an oil-field-equipment manufacturer's representative, and he naturally went where people were discovering oil. In 1929 that was the Midland-Odessa-Big Spring area, and my mother was born in Big Spring in that year. So as I owe my existence in an indirect way to the sedimentary deposits of limestone and oil known as the Permian Basin, it's hard for me to be ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
2M ago
Deepfake porn, that is. Last week, Republican Senator Ted Cruz held a news conference in which he supported passage by the U. S. House of a bill called "TAKE IT DOWN," which was passed by the Senate on Dec. 4. Together with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, he has called for the House of Representatives to pass the bill, which would provide federal criminal penalties for those responsible for putting up deepfake porn, as well as requiring the platforms that host it to take it down within 48 hours of receiving requests to do so.
Several victims of deepfake porn testifie ..read more
Engineering Ethics Blog
2M ago
Wired technology reviewer Lisa Wood Shapiro is worried that just walking across a carpet will adversely affect her health. At least she says she's worried, because she wrote a whole column about how just walking across a carpet can cause "resuspension" and raise up detectible amounts of "PM 2.5," which are particulates under 2.5 millionths of a meter in diameter. That's pretty small, and not anything you can see with the naked eye. One type of technology she reviews is particulate detectors, and that's how she knows that just walking across even a nominally clean carpe ..read more